Acceptable Targets: The bad guys in the first game are demons from Hell. Feel free to be an Ax-Crazy orgy of death now. The second game not only has the demons, but there are also secret levels that are populated by Nazis.

The Cyberdemon can be this, straddling the line between this and Wake-Up Call Boss. Once you get past his giant roar and KATHUNK-KATHUNK-KATHUNK footsteps, he's less of a boss and more of a circle-strafing target since, unlike the Bruisers, there's only one of him and he hangs out in a much more open arena. His rockets are definitely faster than the fireballs you've been dodging up to this point, but after a while you will find yourself filing them under Painfully Slow Projectiles all the same.

Even the Spider Mastermind is anticlimactic if you collected the BFG in an earlier map, dying in only two or three hits at most. With some skill and a good bit of luck, it's possible to get a One-Hit Kill at point blank range, as you can have the maximum damage output from the BFG and have all the tracers hit.

Awesome: Video Game Levels: Level 8 of Doom II, "Tricks and Traps", the first level that throws Serious Sam levels of enemies at you, lets you fight a wave of Imps while invincible, and where you can cause infighting between a Cyberdemon and an army of Barons.

Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The finale for the Game Boy Advance edition of Doom shows the ending picture from Ultimate Doom's fourth episode, with the marine carrying the severed head of his unfortunate pet bunny, but it doesn't show the cutscene from episode three that gives the picture its context, leaving new players wondering why the hell Doomguy is just holding some rabbit's head.

Breather Level: Map four of Thy Flesh Consumed, "Unruly Evil" will come across as this. While resources aren't plentiful, the enemy count is low with no real dangerous placements nor difficult level sections, and the level on a whole is rather easy. Unruly Evil comes after those two levels and another fairly difficult level.

Split between the original games, Doom 3 and Doom (2016) for the most part, with a bit of this showing for the novels, movie, comic and other sources. Many consider Doom 3 to be genuinely scary, intense, and visually appealing, but the combat and general pacing are slow and clunky when compared to the original games. Meanwhile, Doom (2016) returns to the fast-paced action and has astonishing visuals, but leaves little room for the player to feel frightened by the game's enemies.

Debates about Doom II level design and whether or not Sandy Petersen is a good substitute for John Romero are also quite common. Some people consider levels from Doom II way too gimmicky and inconsistent, especially compared to now-legendary level design of Doom I. Others appreciate them for being very creative and exploiting tricks and ideas that could be executed with id Tech 1 - something that was further explored by fan mapmakers.

The TNT Evilution half of Final Doom also gets this, especially in comparison to the much more universally beloved The Plutonia Experiment. Fans still argue as to whether it's a good, well-rounded entry in the series, or just an inferior rehash of the first game that should have been cast aside in favor of Plutonia.

Brutal Doom also has this. Some consider it the best mod made for the game, period. Others consider it to be excessive and overhyped, if not a bit buggy. The arguments over the mod itself are also hurt greatly by Sgt_Mark_IV (the mod's creator) having alienated and/or angered a good chunk of the Doom community with racist remarks, a general bad attitude and even encouraging a member of the community to commit suicide- acts which led to him being banned from several Doom message forums. The creators of the Metroid Dreadnought mod also refused to make it compatible with Brutal Doom, in part because they have been in contact with Nintendo's legal department over their mod and are afraid that Nintendo might C&D them if they associate with Mark in any way (their concern is that Nintendo would learn what Mark is like and associate his behavior with their team, and when you have a major company watching your unauthorized project based on their IP, it may be a valid concern).

Dwango5, according to Doomworld. Seventeen DWANGO compilations for a total of over 300 maps, and only the first and, more rarely, seventh maps of Dwango5 saw any play.

Brutal Doom has been hit extremely hard with this, due to the majority of players never trying anything else and loading everything they play with Brutal Doom (and then being turned off when it inevitably doesn't work). Or worse, being completely unaware of any other mods or their accomplishments.

Revenants are tall, fast skeletons with reasonable health and the capability of firing missiles that have a chance to home in on you. The missiles can do up to 80 damage each, even stronger than Baron or Hell Knight projectiles, and if they're homing, they have a very good aiming trajectory. The worst part? Map makers love utilising them in large groups. Have "fun".

Arch-Viles can take a fair amount of punishment, do a Hell of a lot of damage in turn, and can revive or (in the third game) summon enemies. Prioritize death for them first.

Former commando chaingunners are not to be underestimated, in large groups especially. The careless player can lose health rapidly at close range, and at long ranges, can take damage unexpectedly from the dakka as long as they have line-of-sight with the zombie(s). On the original Doom engine, Fake Difficulty in the form of no mouse aiming can prevent you shooting back from afar at a different elevation.

In Doom 64, the Pain Elementals:

While in Doom 2, Pain Elementals were merely annoying mook makers that drew fire and distracted you from much more threatening enemies, they underwent a huge upgrade in Doom 64. In Doom 64, they shoot out two Lost Souls each time they attack instead of just one, and with Lost Soul limit like the original Doom 2, Pain Elementals will quickly overwhelm the player if they're not dealt with promptly. Additionally, if the player tries hugging the Pain Elemental's face to prevent Lost Soul spawning like you could in Doom 2, the spawned Lost Souls will instead explode and deal damage equivalent to a Rocket's explosion, turning them from completely helpless to extremely dangerous in close quarters.

On top of that, the Lost Souls themselves are much more aggressive (but thankfully more frail), and will repeatedly charge at the player in sight unless stunned or killed, making them quite distracting and dangerous. All this results in an enemy that can soak up nearly as much if not even more ammo than a Baron of Hell, being nearly as much of an offensive threat as the Arachnotrons, and being able to completely trap and overwhelm the player unlike any other enemy in the game. Better hope you find the secret levels and the demon artifacts to power up the Unmaker before the later levels, where the game loves to throw multiple Pain Elementals at you at once in large open areas with little-to-no cover.

Ironically, the Arachnotrons don't quite reach Demonic Spider status, but they certainly straddle the line. They're too easily stunlocked to be a top-tier threat, but if you let them start shooting their plasma rifles can really stack up the damage. In Doom 64, they get a buff, where they fire two plasma shots at once at an even faster rate, allowing them to rack up damage at a crazy high rate, though they also get an even higher pain chance to make them even more easily stunlocked.

For ZDoom-users, the Realm667 Bestiary page has many of their own brutal enemies to the table. There's too many to list.

A more recent megawad, Valiant, has its fair share of horrible enemies replacing some of the existing Doom II enemies. Super imps and super demons are more or less Goddamned Bats instead.

Pyro Knights retain the 500 hitpoints of the bog-standard Hell Knights, but they have two attacks which they can use randomly. One of them where they shoot a stream of four fast and powerful projectiles, and one where they shoot two of those and four super imp fireballs. And these guys start showing up in the second episode onward.

Cybruisers also have 500 hitpoints, but they shoot rockets and are immune to splash damage.

Arachnrobs are flying arachnotrons without their walking apparatus and retain the stream-shooting tendencies of their on-land bretheren. They start appearing in the fourth map of episode 1. They also have a chance of spawning once an arachnotron goes down. And their plasma's still just as strong. Have fun.

Suicide bombers, the zombies in black clothing holding a stick of explosive, are just as durable as imps, and make a beeline straight for you before exploding on your face for heavy damage. And they retain the kamikaze screaming from Serious Sam too. Joy.

Super Mancubi, or Daedabi, are the Classic Doom equivalent of Doom 3's mancubi, having nearly as much health as barons of hell. (900, in this case) and they shoot two volleys of six projectiles at a time rather quickly, making dodging difficult and getting in melee range suicidal.

Many players see the Icon of Sin like this, as they see it as an annoying out-of-placePuzzle Boss that relies on engine limitations (mainly the lack of freelook/vertical aiming) to be challenging, when they would have preferred a more conventional souped-up boss monster to finish the game on. It also doesn't help that the Icon of Sin is just a texture on a wall rather than an actual monster.

This also applies to megawads that end on an Icon of Sin level (which is the vast majority of them, and includes TNT and Plutonia). Even when Icon of Sin levels can be highly creative and vary greatly, such players will just no clip to attack the boss brain directly or just quit out and consider the megawad beaten. The fact that so many megawads ended on an IoS level is another factor to making the Icon of Sin so disliked among a significant portion of the playerbase.

In the original Doom, Dis is generally seen as one, being just a small visually-unimpressive one-room arena that just houses the Spider Mastermind and a few other monsters, while the Spider Mastermind is infamous for being seen as a significant stepdown after the Cyberdemon in the previous episode, to the point that even the developers remarked it was a mistake having the Mastermind after the Cyberdemon.

Ultimate Doom's final level, Unto the Cruel, is also generally considered one; while unlike Dis it has an actual level leading up to the boss fight, the fact it's against the Spider Mastermind again, in an arena where it's even easier to fight, left a sour taste in many players' mouths. Unto the Cruel is also a significantly easier level than much of what the player contended with in Episode 4.

In the Jaguar, 32X, 3DO, and GBA ports of the original Doom, with the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind removed, a new final level was needed, so the Fortress of Mystery was moved from a secret level to the final level, completely unchanged. Now Fortress of Mystery is generally considered the absolute worst level in the original/Ultimate Doom and a complete letdown of a secret level, so needless to say, this applies to these ports.

The PlayStation/Saturn ports of Doom have a unique final level not in any other versions of Doom, Redemption Denied. It's an arena level that puts you up against a bunch of Barons initially, but with them grouped up and a large space to easily circle strafe them in while you lob rockets with impunity, they're of little threat. After you kill them all, two closets open up with a Spider Mastermind each, which sounds like it could be really challenging...until you remember the Mastermind uses a hitscan attack and thus they can (and will easily) infight with each other, leaving you with just a single near-death Mastermind to fight at the end.

Doom 64 averts this under normal play with its final level, The Absolution, as its disabled infighting on arena levels means you can't cheese the small army you're fighting to all kill each other, while you have a legitimately challenging boss afterwards when much of your ammo has been depleted. If you go into the level with at least two Demon Keys however, it falls right into this, as you can skip most (with 2 keys) or all (with all 3 keys) of the initial army sequence, while the powered-up Unmaker will make even the Mother Demon a complete breeze to kill.

Ear Worm: All over the original games, since the soundtracks were done by Bobby Prince.

The BFG in multi-player, due to the aforementioned ability to fire off a shot in one room, run over to another player, and then hit-scan frag them without them even knowing. They could even kill you first, and still get nailed by the hit-scan! It isn't a pushover in single player either. The high damage and extreme blast radius of its attack could clear an entire room of baddies. Custom level makers may note this and balance levels with hoards of monsters to encourage skillful BFG use.

The Unmaker in Doom 64, once you find two or three secret artifacts, it becomes the bane to the legion of Hell. It goes from an unspectacular laser beam to a powerful, rapid-firingspread shot that decimates enemies in no time. Even the Final Boss can die in well under 10 seconds from it at level-3-power, and the aforementioned Pain Elementals with all their Lost Souls can be destroyed within a second by it without any retaliation. The scarcity of plasma ammo prevents the player from being able to rely on it as their primary weapon however, preventing it from eliminating the game's difficulty, but as long as its ammo is adequately conserved, it can get the player out of pretty much every tight combat spot in the game.

In a more retro tone, the now-ubiquitous mouse and keyboard combo turns the original games' Nightmare! difficulty playable even by a relatively unskilled player, while Ultra-Violence becomes a walk in the park, and it's not exclusive to source ports.note The original DOS games also supports mouse control, so players can configure the controls to standard mouse and keyboard set-up of later first-person shooters and play the games in this fashion. The monsters were never coded to deal with a player as agile as they are with this combination, even when auto-aim is disabled while playing them through a source port, and are little more threatening than glorified zombies that can fire projectiles, especially when it comes to open areas. The Cyberdemon is a particularly egregious victim due to the ease of circlestrafing. Most custom maps take note of this, and scale the difficulty accordingly.

In the ZDoom source ports, if one ports the Sapphire Wand from Hexen into Doom, it completely demolishes the Spider Mastermind since the Sapphire Wand's projectiles rip through enemies, which ends up doing more damage to foes with extremely wide hitboxes such as the Spider Mastermind. It is, however, less effective against the Cyberdemon since it has a thinner hitbox than the Spider Mastermind. In the Massive Multiplayer CrossoverGame ModSamsara, the Sapphire Wand, as used by Parias, was nerfed so that it does not pierce through tougher monsters such as the aforementioned bosses.

Doom 64 does a nice job taking advantage of the Nintendo 64 hardware despite being 2½D, and smooths out the textures nicely with bilinear filtering. Scripting was added to the system, allowing some cool tricks like the illusion of 3d bridges, and conditional triggers on geometry as well as monster spawning. "Level 23: Unholy Temple" is like a tech demo for engine tricks, with very convincing 3d bridges, a combination lock puzzle, and some nicely detailed citadel walls around the central temple.

Genre Turning Point: Doom wasn't the first FPS game, but it was the game that really set the genre on fire. Soon after Doom was released to massive acclaim due to its great gameplay, frightening atmosphere, and revolutionary multiplayer, countless video game developers started developing their own FPS games. Because this was before the term FPS existed, computer gaming magazines referred to these games as "Doom clones."

Goddamned Bats: The Lost Souls, plus some enemies from the ZDoom Realm 667 beastiary.

The Lost Souls in Doom 64 are much less durable, but far more aggressive. If you fight enough of them at once they can easy reach Demonic Spider status.

The Former Human Commandos/Heavy Weapon Dudes are a huge pain, especially when they are well-placed like in the Mission-Pack Sequel "The Plutonia Experiment". Each bullet only causes between 3-15 damage pointsnote that is only slightly less minimal damage than player's chaingun, but this monster fires just as fast as the player can (not good), and won't stop until its either dead, it is hurt by any source of damage, or you're out of its line of sight. If forced out into the open, a platoon of chain gunners can drain your health at an alarming rate.

Good Bad Bugs: The iDtech engine Doom runs upon has some amusing 'quirks':

Due to the way the game handles textures, it is possible to get a Hall of Mirrors effect under certain circumstances. This effect is actually deliberately utilized in some fanmade WAD mods.

In early versions of the game, because of how the game assigns an 'owner' for sources of damage and the monster infighting code, a monster that injures itself by accidentally detonating a barrel with its own ranged attack while trying to hit its original target will end up in a frenzy, killing itself with its own melee attack if it has one or just shooting blindly in all directions if it's a purely ranged attacker. This phenomenon is known as "barrel suicide", and some source ports implement it because it's hilariously dumb.

Some of the debates over the quality of the various Game Mods can be... heated. Of specific note, quite a few flame wars erupted when the massively popular Aeons of Death received a surprisingly vitriolicAward Snub in the 2010 Cacowards.

Misaimed Fandom: In one of the most infamous cases of this trope, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the killers at Columbine, were avid fans of the game and even created custom maps for it. Doom was one of many different reasons cited as to what motivated the pair to shoot up their school.

The Icon of Sin's greeting message sounds even creepier in the custom megawad Alien Vendetta.

In source ports with the aforementioned "Ouch Face", it's pretty funny the first time you see the Doomguy's expression when he takes high damage. As his health drops lower and lower, though, and the "Ouch Face" is triggered, you get to see the Doomguy's facial wounds in all its glory, including huge bullet holes, with blood still dripping from them.

A few scenes are pretty up there, such as the opening, and what happens to Goat after he is killed.

Paranoia Fuel: In one of the closing scenes, by the point when you've gotten used to all the jump-scares that the game throws at you... there's a level where NOTHING comes out.

In E2M5, there's a marble wall with an alien face that damages you, just for standing in front of it. That texture shows up a lot in other levels, and each time you see it, you'll wonder if it's going to damage you, too. In reality, it's actually a damaging floor in disguise, but still...

The original Xbox version of The Ultimate Doom and Doom II included in Doom 3: Limited Collector's Edition and Resurrection of Evil (the latter also includes the Master Levels of Doom II) are near-faithful ports of the PC version. Unlike the other console ports, nothing was sacrificed during the transition, they run on a decent frame-rate, and includes a new secret level for each game. There are some game-breaking bugs however (e.g. potential crashes, being trapped in certain areas of a map or stuck in objects), and due how classic cheat codes were handled, players may accidentally activate a cheat while holding the sprint button. The HD version on Xbox LIVE Arcade fixes many of issues of the original Xbox version while giving these games a higher native resolution, uses the Gravis Ultrasound music, added online multi-player, and in Doom II's case, features an all-new "No Rest for the Living" episode. Unfortunately the Wolfenstein 3D levels were censored, and the red medical crosses were removed. These ports were also included as part of Doom 3: BFG Edition and the PlayStation 3-exclusive Doom Classic Complete compilation; the latter also includes Final Doom and Master Levels of Doom II.

The PlayStation version combined both Doom and Doom II into one, featured new lighting effects, and changed the rockin' soundtrack for some dark and ambient music that make it feel like a horror game. And while there are some things missing here and there a la the Jaguar version (mainly for performance reasons), such as the lack of the Arch-Vile and Icon of Sin, the port makes up for it by adding in new visual changes that are really cool and really add to the atmosphere, like the sky in the Hell maps being an animated wall of flame. It also featured Doom II monsters in the original Doom when played on Ultra-Violence. The same treatment was also given to the PlayStation version of Final Doom which also featured levels from Master Levels of Doom II.

Porting Disaster: Doom has been ported to all sorts of systems, some of which couldn't really handle a game of its size and complexity all that well. This often resulted in extremely pixellated graphics, shortened and sometimes removed levels, missing weapons, fewer types of enemies and removed frames of animation for said same. The last one led to "crab-walking" enemies that faced the player constantly, meaning it was impossible to sneak up on them and very difficult to trick them into damaging one another.

The SNES and Sega 32X versions are considered the worst of these: The SNES version gets props for being made in the first place, and sported a few pros such as an awesome soundtrack, full enemy roster, all the original game's levels, all power-ups, the least simplified maps and a spiffy red cartridge, but also had the graphical problems mentioned above in addition to no circle-strafing, while the 32X version — despite appearing on an allegedly more advanced system, it got even worse: terrible music, and losing more levels than any other port and both the Cyberdemon and the Spider Mastermind monsters. The remaining levels were also haphazardly gutted, sometimes making it impossible to get a 100% score since items and enemies had been left in removed areas of the maps. The BFG is technically programmed into the game, but is impossible to get because every location it would have appeared in has been cut and the developers didn't add any pick-ups for it anywhere else.

The Sega Saturn version of the game, despite being on a more advanced system than the 32X, is an absolute mess. It suffers from horrible frame-rate issues, jerky and unresponsive controls with a questionable control scheme makes it almost unplayable. The American (but not the European and Japanese) version also axes the multiplayer. And some of the sound effects are lower quality than the other versions.

The 3DO version comes dangerously close to being the very worst. In addition to cutting the same levels and monsters as the Jaguar and GBA versions, it also has serious frame-rate issues. You can either shrink the screen down (making it virtually impossible to see anything without bunching up to the TV), or you could make the window bigger (which caused the frame rate to drop into single digits at points). The only thing saving it is the awesomely remixed soundtrack.

The Atari Jaguar version is pretty decent for a console port (Romero, Carmack, and id Software developed the Jaguar version themselves, and many of the console ports are based on this version), but it contains no in-game music because the sheer computing load on the console's co-processor precluded it from playing the music!

The Game Boy Advance versions of Doom and Doom II manage to subvert this. Despite having a lower framerate, low-res visuals, altered levels, bowdlerization of the blood/gore, and being released on a handheld console, they both manage to be remarkably well-done ports considering the GBA's limitations and impressive additions to the system's library of first-person shooters.

The pistol, after the chain gun is picked up. You'd expect the chain gun to be less accurate due to being a mini gun, but repeatedly tapping the fire button lets you fire accurate double shots for sniping, using the pistol's ammo. This is one reason why weapon mods may try to replace the pistol with a viable starting weapon (such as Brutal Doom's assault rifle), or enhance it (like Project Brutality adding both a Guns Akimbo option, as well as a Supressor to make it a stealth weapon).

Doom 64's addition of the Unmaker, will eventually turn the Plasma Gun into this trope, due to the Unmaker using cells. Once you've upgraded the Unmaker only once, there is no reason to even bother using Plasma Gun; the Unmaker will have a greater rate of fire after the first upgrade, and regardless of upgrades, each laser shot deals up to twice the amount of damage a single plasma shot will deal, and despite the lasers looking like projectiles, it's a hitscan weapon, meaning it'll hit its target instantly unobstructed with full accuracy. Get the second and third upgrades, it'll shoot two and then three laser shots at once, giving it an incredible rate of fire that can stunlock even the Cyberdemon and Mother Demon to death, leaving the Plasma Gun hopelessly outclassed. The Plasma Gun also got nerfed, and fires 1/3 slower than the original version of the weapon, and emits an annoying loud buzzing noise at idle. The BFG still remains powerful and can clear out large hordes faster and more efficiently, while having a greater DPS at optimal point blank usage, but can't match the Unmaker's ease of use and ability to stunlock anything to near-instant death.

"Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: The first game was credited with popularizing the entire FPS genre, creating the A Space Marine Is You formula, garnering attention for its shocking violence, and introducing game modding. Naturally, some would draw unfavorable comparisons by modern standards. Many younger shooter fans would consider is gameplay to be simplistic and its story to be lazily shoehorned compared to likes of Halo and Bioshock. Likewise, while Doom garnered much infamy during the 90s for its violence, modern graphics can depict far more realistic and disturbing acts of violence.

Slow-Paced Beginning: A common view of Plutonia; the game immediately throws the player into maps far more difficult than the hardest maps the other iwads had to offer, bringing a rude awakening to many first-time players, while its first five maps are also Plutonia's weakest and ugliest maps, which can deter such players from grunting through them to see the rest of Plutonia. Players that make it through that rough start generally end up enjoying Plutonia much more, as the maps become funner and more visually appealing, while the player becomes acclimated to Plutonia's increased difficulty.

And for some people, the four novels based on the original game. The demons were changed to aliens and the Doomguy was forced to have a female Marine tagging along with him, then her plus a Mormon soldier and a teenager on Earth. That's ignoring how the third and fourth books really went off on a tangent about faith and the soul.

The soundtrack to the Sega 32X version is this to some fans, (see Porting Disaster) due to the poor use of the system's audio chips resulting in a rendition of the game's classic soundtrack that sounds like...er, bowel movements.

Special Effect Failure: The Windows port, Doom95 (which incorporates Doom, Doom II, Ultimate Doom and Final Doom) makes full use of Windows' facilities, including using hardware acceleration (where available) to implement the "partial invisibility" effect. Unfortunately, on some graphics cards this didn't work properly, and Spectres (and players using the Partial Invisibility power-up) are even more conspicuous than other creatures. Modern computers don't always make it work properly either. Lampshaded in the Doom95 manual: "Due to all of this new hardware tech, the previously-nearly-invisible Spectres are now in the realm of sorta-invisible. To make up for the difference, please close your eyes when you encounter them."

Tear Jerker: The track "Sign of Evil" is extremely somber and melancholy

That One Boss: The Mother Demon in Doom 64 is a killing machine, especially on the hardest difficulty Watch Me Die. She possesses the Revenants' homing missiles, fired in quads, as well as a flame trail that is fired in all four compass directions. Without the Unmaker powered up at least twice, she is nasty opponent to fight. Also, your resources are partly spent from The War Sequence that must be fought in this instance.

However, this is averted by finding the secret levels in the game to assemble your aforementioned ultimate weapon. Find all three artifacts and you can seal off the demon portals and proceed to the final battle immediately. The Unmaker acts like a laser gatling, easily stun locking her and leaving her dead in seconds.

That One Level: (Note that all of the below presumes you're playing in Ultra-Violence difficulty, since most of the community considers that canon and proper.)

The Ultimate Doom:

"E2M6: Halls of the Damned" is a drag the first time playing it without a strategy guide. The goal is to obtain all three keys to open the exit near the start, but two of the keys are buried deep in the halls. The major threat is a maze region with a Lovecraftian layout, and some nasty monster ambushes. The night-vision goggles placed through out the level help a lot here. There is also a nasty Kaizo Trap deep within the level.

"E3M7: Limbo" is not heavily populated, but is made difficult by a teleport puzzle that must be solved by crossing mandatory "hurt-floors" with a finite supply of hazard suit power-ups. The first time in this level will probably be very confusing, with the player wondering how the hell they raise the bridge to the exit door. Much of this level is figuring out where the numerous teleport pads lead.

In Episode Four of Ultimate Doom, "E4M1: Hell Beneath" and "E4M2: Perfect Hatred" are infamous for their difficulty. Hell Beneath is a short level with not that high of an enemy count, but it's the first level of the episode (so you must Pistol start it) and has a severe lack of resources (there's only 9 health bonuses for health (a total of 109% health you'll have for the level), a suit of green armor with 12 armor bonuses (a total of 112% armor for the level), and not enough ammo to kill all the Hell Barons unless you can get them grouped together to spread out enough damage with your 12 rockets).

Perfect Hatred, while not lacking in resources like the previous level, is usually considered the most difficult level in Ultimate Doom. It's a compact level where you must constantly jump over lava pits while being assaulted from all around you with no cover, with powerful enemies placed in the most inconvenient of places (there are 12 Hell Barons in the level, all fought in either tight spaces or on little ground to maneuver on). The exploitation of two design oversights (grabbing the BFG through the wall its behind to obtain it significantly earlier, and skipping a large portion of the level by exploiting a jump to access the last area without the blue key) are pretty much required for many normal players to beat the level on Ultra-Violence difficulty, and few can beat the level on Nightmare without utilising those exploits.

Map 6 of Episode 4, Against Thee Wickedly, also contends with the aforementioned two levels for most difficult level in Ultimate Doom. The main feature of the level is a teleporter that the player must use to access different parts of the level. However entering the teleporter from different directions teleports the player to different areas, and the teleporter is located in a large lava pool, while the level in general forces the player to run through lava at frequent points, meaning the player will regularly be taking unavoidable damage trying to figure the level out. The level is additionally large and complex while the teleporter is unintuitive and takes a while to figure out, leading to a ton of unavoidable damage for those who don't know the right path and an effective time limit on figuring the level out. On top of that, resources and radsuits are very limited and spread out, while the opposition is nearly as strong as in the rest of E4 (including a mandatory Cyberdemon fight at the end on a small ledge, though this can be mitigated with a secret BFG and invulnerability that be used to easily defeat the Cyber).

Doom II: Hell On Earth

"Level 10: Refueling Base" is swarming with former-humans, which means that bullets will come flying at you in large quantities. In Doom, hitscan enemies are usually the easiest to kill, but are ironically some of the most challenging foes. Refueling base also has the greatest number of preset enemies of any Doom II level.

"Level 24: The Chasm" can be confusing to navigate, and often forces the player to navigate balance-beam rails about hazardous waste. The first time playing, it is very possible to spend much time figuring out where you have to go next within the massive structure. For the extra kicker, the ending sequence of the level has the player run over a thin maze-like rail that decreases in width the closer it gets to the end (to the point that it becomes nearly invisible from how thin it gets), while being assaulted by a bunch of Lost Souls from all directions, over a nukage pit that the player cannot get out of should they fall off the thin and hard-to-navigate railing. So you play through this long, confusing, boring level, and then have to restart it at the end if you don't save scum, because you got hit by a Lost Soul or made a misstep off a stick-thin railing.

"Level 5: Ghost Town" is a rude awakening and likely the hardest level of the first six intro levels. The level punishes players who are used to playing Doom without taking cover. The level has a central courtyard, with two more courtyards that are required for exiting the level. The south has nests filled with Chaingun Zombies who will kill you fast if you don't snipe them first, and a Spider Mastermind who isn't too bad due to the cover in the central courtyard. The North is very brutal if you don't expect it; a grand stairway leads up to the exit room but if you rush up their aimlessly, two Arch-Viles will lower from pillars to make your life terrifying, and more Chaingunners nests will be revealed in the same room.

"Level 9: Abattoir" isn't too much of a handful at first, but once you reach the final stretch of the level, reaching the exit can be a real struggle. Chaingun Commandos in a sniper nest can turn you into burger fast, and if you didn't save the invulnerability power up just for this, it's even more of a pain. Playing on the original engine, retaliation is difficult here due to the lack of mouse aiming, and rushing in locks you in permanently and opens up some painful traps. Don't fall of the edges, or it's Game Over. Patience is a virtue.

"Level 15: The Twilight" looks deceptively simple, but taking cover from enemy fire is near-mandatory. The hallways are very claustrophobic, and distant enemies are often able to attack through hard-to-see-through metal bars. Much of the pain in this level is from slowly sniping the enemies to make each room safe to navigate, but a nest of Chaingun Commandos are resurrected by hidden Arch-Viles indefinitely until the end, making the central hub unsafe to stand in.

"Level 29: Odyssey of Noises". The level is a Quicksand Box with a large city street to explore and not much in the way of sign posts. Without a strategy guide, is easy to spend an hour just looking for the first key wondering where in the hell you have to go. It gets a easier after the first key is found, but garages open on the buildings with some nasty hordes of monsters to keep you distracted, likely breaking your concentration on locating the locked doors. Fortunately, once you beat it, you're off to fight the Final Boss.

In TNT Evilution (the other half of Final Doom), "Level 27: Mount Pain" lives up to its name with its abundance of hitscan enemies in long narrow passages (some of which are hiding behind fake walls), Revenants and their homing missiles in wide open areas, mandatory treks across damaging floors, and near the end are infinitely-spawning Lost Souls chasing you down through two wide open rooms. Top all of this off with the last room with two Revenants, a Mancubus, a Chaingunner, and an Arch-Vile with little cover and some stray Lost Souls from the previous room, and a shortage of health throughout the map, and you have one hell of a painful map.

TNT Map 9, Stronghold, is notorious for being the most difficult official level on Nightmare difficulty, being even harder than all the Plutonia levels on Nightmare. The level features a staggering 297 enemy count, the highest of any official map, and 70% of which are hitscan enemies, with 68 of them being Chaingunners. The level is additionally confined and interconnected, while the player repeatedly has to go through areas they already been through and while windows open exposing the players to other areas. The result on Nightmare is the player constantly getting shot at by a huge amount of enemies that instantly fire upon sight and cannot be dodged, with pretty much no cover whatsoever. It was the last official map to have a Nightmare run successfully recorded for Compet-N, with a premier speedrunner named Xit Vono accomplishing it for the first time 15 years after TNT's release, and since Vono's run, the only other player to record a successful Nightmare run on the level is Drew "stx-Vile" Devore. The level is additionally pretty much the sole reason why no one has ever completed a full nightmare run of TNT Evilution outside of TAS, and for no one even completing a first episode (levels 1-10) nightmare run of Evilution.

Doom 64

"Level 6: Alpha Quadrant" is where levels start causing easy deaths, especially on Watch Me Die, which also programs monsters to retaliate very frequently from the pain you inflict. What makes it painful is an abyssal room with severe darkness, populated with specters in the pit that can corner you easily, and Pain Elementals. Much time can be spent, trying to clear a safe patch through this room to hit the switches you need to access the final key. By the way, you can't save scum on the Nintendo 64, so if you die in Doom 64, you go back to the beginning of the level.

"Level 9: Even Simpler" can be very fun, but get ready to be barbecued after raising the elevator in the center of the arena, your first time through. "Watch Me Die" has you completely surrounded by Mancubi, who carpet the air with their painful fireball attacks. The mercy here is that if you die a lot here, you haven't lost much progress. The rest of the level is certainly "not simple" due to the nasty assortment of monsters, including Pain Elementals, and you don't have the BFG nor the Unmaker powered up beyond level one yet. On the other hand, beating this level is a thrill.

"Level 16: Blood Keep" has a layout that is fairly complicated to figure out, and is a fairly long level. The exit room has a nasty surprise: Some Lost Souls assault you and are easy enough to deal with, but after they die, the edges of the room (2/3 the room) lower into an inescapable death-pit that kills you, which means that if you happen to wander here at the wrong time, you go back to the beginning. Note that the Doom 64: Absolution, game mod for the PC has an alteration of this trap, that is not to be confused with the original, where the sides lower right away, and the safe zone is even smaller, with the player surrounded by hell-knights. This game engine is built on JDoom and allows Save Scumming unlike on the N64, lessening the likelihood of redoing the level.

"Level 21: Pitfalls", oh...damn. This level certainly has pitfalls with plenty of lava to swim in, and a treacherous layout somewhat like "The Chasm" in Doom 2, only you're more tense about dying because of the "no save scumming" limitation. The castle-like halls in another section of the map also contain some nasty traps, and there is a point where you must back-track to the beginning to flip a switch you probably forgot about, confused as to why you're stuck. The music track for this level, "Perfect Hate" by Aubrey Hodges, is like a theme for the Nightmare Fuel page, that leaves a helpless feeling.

"Level 23: Unholy Temple", which combines all of Doom 64's hallmarks; long levels with complicated layouts, nasty ambushes by high level monsters in tight situations, death traps, and mandatory puzzles (with the one here spanning across the entire level), all rolled into the game's ultimate Marathon Level. The visual design of the temple however, is a great example of Genius Programming on the Doom 64 engine, easing the pain of this level with Quake-like 3d illusions, and a neat demonstration of the game's scripting capabilities in general.

They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Doom II: Hell on Earth, while a great game, really doesn't take advantage of its Earth-based setting aside from having a few levels that resemble cities and residential areas. One would think a game like this would have large epic battles between the Earth's military and the legions of Hell, or Doomguy going out into the wilderness every once in a while. Sadly this wasn't the case, likely due to the limitations of the original idTech engine, but the 2011 version of Doom 4 was seemingly going to explore at least the former concept, before it was cancelled and re-built from the ground up.

Vindicated by History: Not the original games, but Doom 64. When it came out, many compared it unfavorably to the likes of Quake and other N64 shooters such as Goldeneye (the lack of multiplayer really didn't help it there). Today, with the benefit of PC source ports, it's considered an overlooked gem for its solid map design and creepy atmosphere, not to mention having a Final Boss that's a huge step up from the Spider Mastermind. It's not uncommon to find people who consider it a better Doom 3 than the actual Doom 3.

Visual Effects of Awesome: Being a PC exclusive was a massive boon to it in the visuals department. Back in those days, fully-3D games were expected to look like the original Star Fox. For it's day, Doom was basically Crysis.

What An Idiot: Let's just say the plot of Doom I, and ESPECIALLY the plot of Doom 3 revolves around the UAC having a death grip on the Idiot Ball. Well, to be exact, in 3 the UAC was wise enough to realize the situation was getting ugly and tried to stop it, but blatant idiocy prompted things to go wrong in the first place.

The UAC of Doom 3 aren't geniuses, but they aren't responsible for the fiasco that unfolds. Betruger specifically went against orders and forged a pact with hell that blindsided them, as proven by the two representatives who actually DO come from corporate HQ, who wind up helping to save the human race by containing the problem to Mars. While they SHOULD have gotten rid of Betruger earlier and shouldn't have been dabbling in all the things they were, they took fairly sane precautions that were deliberately undermined by treason from within rather than their own stupidity.

Memetic Mutation: Pretty much everything "Doomguy" says is a catchphrase in the Doom community, most notably "RIP AND TEAR YOUR GUTS!"

Ascended Meme: Half of the Achievement names for the Xbox LIVE Arcade release of Doom II are comic quotes:

"An Important Looking Door" — Find a secret area in a level in single player.

"Rip And Tear" — Complete any level in single player on "Nightmare!" difficulty. On another note, the infamous Brutal Doom mod for the games actually allows one, with the Berserk pack or Demon Strength Rune, to — you guessed it — rip and tear enemies apart. In Doom 4, the entire thing has come full circle where yes, you rip and tear enemies apart Brutal Doom style.

"The Great Communicator" — Get 20 kills in any level with the chainsaw in single player.

"A Man And A Half" — Get 20 kills in any level with the Berzerker power-up in single player.

"You Have Huge Guts" — Kill a Cyberdemon in single player using your fists.

"A Really Big Gun" — Find the BFG-9000 in single player.

Narm Charm: The hero falls in toxic waste while fighting some zombies. When he climbs out, he delivers a hilariously deadpan PSA about pollution.

Some time in 1996 a couple of guys got together and smoked what was apparently a large amount of crack and then injected pure heroin into their eyes and then proceeded to create what is now known only as 'the Doom comic'.

Anti-Climax Boss: The Hell Knight is established early in the film to be the biggest and baddest creature that Grimm's team encounter on Mars, and single-handedly goes on an unopposed rampage through the facilities on both Mars and Earth. Yet when John faces it half-way through the FPS sequence, it gets unceremoniously blown away in a matter of seconds, and we're instead left with the newly-transformed Pinky and Ax-CrazySarge to provide the ending conflict for both the FPS sequence and movie, respectively.

Awesome Music: While the film itself was controversial with the fandom, to say the least, the track "First-Person Shooter" has enjoyed praise from even the film's staunchest critics, for being a kickass metal track that fits Doom like a glove. It's even become a popular choice for fanmade WAD soundtracks.

The premise of the creatures in the movie actually being former humans transformed by an outside force makes it seem that the writers either knew or cared very little about the game's premise. While the Doom games did feature enemies that fit that sort of criteria, they were still only a small and relatively insignificant portion compared to the bulk of the game's antagonists, which were interdimensional demons that were brought to Mars by a botched teleporter experiment.

One of the chief criticisms of the movie when it was released was that it would probably have been more enjoyable had it been the first person sequence stretched out over the whole film. Almost exactly a decade later, Hardcore Henry would be exactly that!

Moral Event Horizon: Sarge crosses it when he orders The Kid to kill the uninfected UAC personnel, and then shoots him when he refuses.

Signature Scene: The first-person sequence, which is generally regarded as the highlight of the film even by its many detractors.

Spiritual Adaptation: An experiment conducted by an amoral corp backfires and causes horrible mutations, then a team of elite badass soldiers are sent to clean the mess and suffer great casualties... Despite being an official adaptation of Doom, the plot is much close to a Resident Evil in space.

They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Not only were the resources to make this movie wasted on a plot that had nothing to do with the actual game, but even the movie completely fails to take advantage of its Mars setting or give a proper explanation as to why a Martian retrovirus would change some people into superhumans but others into monsters based on how "good" or "evil" they are. And even though teleporters are established and used prominently in the movie, they aren't even what bring the creatures to Mars.

Video-Game Movies Suck: Despite a solid budget, big-name draw and being violent enough for an R rating, the assessment is that it's either So Bad, It's Good for how it craps badass all over the place, start to finish, or a complete fail for having next to nothing to do with any of the Doom storylines. Its actors are certainly giving it all they've got, and it has that rockin' FPS sequence and music.

Roger Ebert's review for the movie provides the quote for this trope's page.

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